EOF - Net Development

The platform is the Net. Not just the Web. That's why we need to open it.

It's important to remember that the Web began as a project. As Tim
Berners-Lee explained (in an August 1991 post to alt.hypertext,
groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/msg/395f282a67a1916c),
“The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and
hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.”

Nearly two decades later, the Web has done exactly that—and much more.
While still the province of search engines and browsers, it also includes a
collection of utilities we call the cloud, backed by massive storage and
compute capacities residing in the racks of Amazon and Google. That's in
addition to countless Web services, applications and other graces of
development work (such as we cover in the preceding pages of this month's
Linux Journal).

Yet no matter how large and encompassing the Web becomes, the Net remains
the broader platform, the more encompassing environment. Everywhere society
has digital foundations, the Net is there to make the connections. Today
those connections span the whole world. So why don't we hear more about Net
Development?

Although there are plenty of Internet protocols and applications outside the
Web (IM, file syncing and sharing, and e-mail all jump to mind), we tend not
to think of the Net as a platform. Perhaps that's because the Net's
protocol suite is about transport rather than presentation or
application. It doesn't care what datalinks (Ethernet, DSL, WDM, MoCA) or
what physical or wireless media (copper, fiber, Wi-Fi, 3G, WiMAX) are used.
It just makes a best effort over what's available.

And, that's the gating factor: what's available.

Today, most of us get on the Net through a phone or cable company that sells
Net access as the third act in what they call a triple play. The first
two acts are telephony and television. The Comcast Triple Play, for
example, is pitched as “The best in TV, phone and Internet—three great
services. One low bill. Hey, life just got a little easier.” This positions
the Net as just another “service”, on par with television and telephony.
Never mind that the Net can encompass both.

And they don't give us the whole Net. They cripple it with asymmetrical
provisioning (even fiber deals default to higher downstream than upstream
bitrates), blocked ports and lack of fixed IP addresses. If we want more,
we have to move up to a “business” tier that begins with lower data rates
and much higher prices—a shakedown racket that persists from the days
when Ma Bell and national PPTs ruled the Earth.

The Net most of us know best is one where the Web is a wide-open platform
for development, while the Net it runs on is “delivered” as a data spigot.
Back when the carriers first realized that they were now ISPs, the Internet
service they thought they'd be providing was biased by what they knew best
and expected people would want: entertainment on the TV model. That usage
materialized, but so did countless others. The carriers continue to miss a
lesson of Web development that has thrived in spite of carriers'
asymmetrical biases: that open platforms and without commercial biases
support an infinitude of business. The Web is generative. (As Jonathan
Zittrain puts it in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop
It—for more,
see “A Tale of Two Futures”, the EOF from July 2008.) They don't yet see how
selling the Net as just one (crippled) “play” forecloses an infinitude of
other plays.

But the tide is starting to turn. In November 2008, I attended a
“brainstorm”
conference in London, put on by the Telco 2.0 Initiative, the mission of
which is to “catalyze change in the Telecoms-Media-Technology
sector”. Every
speaker and panelist inveighed, one way or another, against “triple
play”
and every other doomed-monopoly business model. Instead, they expanded on
this advice in the Telco 2.0 Manifesto (www.telco2.net/manifesto):

Problem is, this still positions carriers as intermediaries between
businesses and consumers. It ignores the enormous reservoir of production
capacity on the “consumer” side, both by individual users and by
developers—two parties who have been dancing away on the Web's wide-open floor.

The big money for carriers isn't just going to be in B2B and B2C. It will
be in supporting all kinds of new activities made possible by a wide-open
Net: one no longer biased toward single uses and no longer priced to
discourage productive involvement by individuals and small businesses.

For that to happen, we need developers to step up with ideas that are
Net-based and not just Web-based—ideas that help carriers leverage
benefits of incumbency other than old monopoly businesses.

There are clues in handhelds. The best “smartphones” are computing devices
on which voice is just one among thousands of applications. (See “Smarter
Than Phones” in this issue's UpFront section.) More important, the user is in charge of more
and more apps and what can be done with them.

Independence, autonomy and choice are going to be facts of connected life
for every individual, sooner or later. So will unlimited data integration
and production potential. The policies, preferences and terms of service
that matter will be those asserted by individuals, not just those
controlled by service providers and other sellers.

There are huge opportunities in figuring out ways to help individuals and
businesses form new and symmetrical relationships—ones in which
choice is maximized on both sides. But it won't happen until we make the
Net as open as it was born to be. That's a huge project. And we've barely
started on it.

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal. He is also a fellow with the
Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the Center
for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara.

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